After the Battle
We, whose work commences only after the battle, have learned to know things that baffle description. Waiting all day long in more or less sheltered positions is sad enough: with the noise of rifle fire and the roaring of the guns we cannot but constantly think of the poor fellows who are being hit. The din of the battle grows less, the night draws on, the moment has now come for us to do our task. With acetylene lamps to light us, we cross the battlefield in all directions and pick up the wounded. As to the dead, alas! how numerous they are! We find them petrified in their last attitude in their last élan. And the crying and moaning of the wounded scattered in the cornfields and among the damp meadows! I know of nothing more poignant than that. The bullets nearly always go right through; wounds in the chest or in the abdomen are almost certainly mortal. Fortunately, such wounds are comparatively few in number. German shells are more noisy than efficient, and their splinters generally only cause small wounds. I must add that the bullets of our rifles are as deadly as those of the Germans, while our shells are far more dangerous than theirs. The poor devils who are hit by them are to be pitied. A good many Germans allow themselves to be made prisoners; they know we will treat them humanely: A Member of the Ambulance Corps.
[XVIII. THE COMMON TASK]
The land we from our fathers had in trust,
And to our children will transmit or die:
This is our maxim, this our piety;
And God and nature say that it is just.
That which we would perform in arms—we must!
Wordsworth’s “Motherland.”
Glory we count of lesser worth
Than wife and babe and hearth and home;
Theirs is the mandate speeding forth
Our steps of thunder on the foam;
For them we fight, for them we stand,
Yea, and for faith ’twixt land and land.
William Watson’s “Ten Men Forsworn.”
Give my love to Patrick-street, Waterford, for that is where the best girl on earth lives, and tell Ireland that we’re doing our duty and that Thomas Moran will have another go at the Germans directly the doctor permits: Pte. T. Moran, East Lancashire Regiment.